Chomsky: “Bernie Is Vilified Because He Has Inspired a Movement”

Chomsky:

There is another special thing about the United States — the militant, almost hysterical, anti-Left propaganda. For example, McCarthyism, which is attributed to Joe McCarthy, though Truman actually is the one who started it. One of its aspects — the red-baiting — was to drive the militant labour leaders out of the unions on charges that they were soft on Communism or working for the Russians or one thing or another. Again, that’s pretty specific to the United States.

You can see that strikingly today where there is huge debate about Sanders being a socialist. ‘How can we have a socialist president?’ In fact, Sanders is what would be called a moderate social democrat in most other societies. In other societies, the word ‘socialist’ is not a curse word — people call themselves socialists and even communists. In the United States, there’s a stigma attached to it by massive propaganda going way back to 1917. Such huge propaganda efforts to demonise the concepts of socialism and communism (saying it means the ‘gulag’ or whatever) is again pretty much unique to the United States. It’s a barrier to introducing even mild New Deal-style social democratic reforms.

These are all specific problems. They’re not completely unique to the United States, of course, but they happen to be exaggerated here because of the nature of the society — that it is business-run to an unusual extent, and this business community is militant and organised. The Chamber of Commerce and other business organisations are fighting a bitter class war.